Stem cells as a good tool to investigate dysregulated biological systems in autism spectrum disorders.
Baby-teeth stem cells give a painless snapshot of autism-linked gene activity.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Griesi-Oliveira et al. (2013) looked at stem cells from baby teeth. These are called SHEDs.
They compared gene activity in kids with autism and kids without it.
No needles or brain biopsies were needed. The teeth were going to fall out anyway.
What they found
They found 683 genes working differently in the autism group.
Many of those genes are also active in the brain.
The results point to the same pathways other autism studies talk about.
How this fits with other research
Talebizadeh et al. (2008) did something similar with blood cells. They checked tiny RNA pieces and saw differences in autism. Both studies show you can use easy-to-get cells instead of brain tissue.
Duan et al. (2020) studied mouse brains and found many of the same gene networks. Karina’s team saw matching patterns in baby-teeth cells. The two papers support each other even though one used mice and the other used humans.
Heald et al. (2020) built a blood test for autism risk using 34 metabolites. Karina’s work adds a different kind of test based on gene read-outs from teeth. Both aim for cheap, kid-friendly screening tools.
Why it matters
You can’t biopsy a child’s brain, but you can save a lost tooth. If future work confirms these gene marks, parents might mail a tooth instead of visiting a clinic for pricey labs. For BCBAs, this means earlier biological confirmation could sit beside your behavior data, helping you start therapy sooner and track progress in new ways.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Identification of the causes of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) is hampered by their genetic heterogeneity; however, the different genetic alterations leading to ASD seem to be implicated in the disturbance of common molecular pathways or biological processes. In this scenario, the search for differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between ASD patients and controls is a good alternative to identify the molecular etiology of such disorders. Here, we employed genome-wide expression analysis to compare the transcriptome of stem cells of human exfoliated deciduous teeth (SHEDs) of idiopathic autistic patients (n = 7) and control samples (n = 6). Nearly half of the 683 identified DEGs are expressed in the brain (P = 0.003), and a significant number of them are involved in mechanisms previously associated with ASD such as protein synthesis, cytoskeleton regulation, cellular adhesion and alternative splicing, which validate the use of SHEDs to disentangle the causes of autism. Autistic patients also presented overexpression of genes regulated by androgen receptor (AR), and AR itself, which in turn interacts with CHD8 (chromodomain helicase DNA binding protein 8), a gene recently shown to be associated with the cause of autism and found to be upregulated in some patients tested here. These data provide a rationale for the mechanisms through which CHD8 leads to these diseases. In summary, our results suggest that ASD share deregulated pathways and revealed that SHEDs represent an alternative cell source to be used in the understanding of the biological mechanisms involved in the etiology of ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2013 · doi:10.1002/aur.1296